From: The South Chicagoan

The National Basketball Association as a whole is stepping up its efforts to try to sway the growing Latino population of this nation into being fans of professional basketball, yet there are times when I wonder how many of these team owners are doing so with a clothespin clamped onto their nostrils.

The story is starting to get around about the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers. One of the sorrier franchises in professional basketball, owner Donald T. Sterling recently settled a lawsuit related to his real estate interests.

IT SEEMS THAT the team owner also owns a series of apartment buildings. His critics say he engaged in rental practices that were meant to discourage black people and Latinos from living in his buildings.

In some cases, Sterling’s staff refused to accept checks for rent payment, then tried to claim that the Latino or black tenants should be evicted for non-payment of rent.

Not that he was offering up housing for “whites only.” It seems that Sterling, according to reports in the LA Weekly newspaper, preferred to market his buildings as residences for people of Korean ethnic backgrounds.

He did this, the newspaper reported, because he sensed that Korean immigrants would be more accepting of substandard conditions and would not generate complaints the way that black and Latino people might.

THERE’S ALSO THE little tidbit from the original lawsuit filed earlier in this decade – one that quotes Sterling as saying that Latinos, “smoke, drink and just hang around the building.” Gee, I never realized it was a criminal act to stay at home.

Of course, would he or people with this kind of mentality have used reverse logic, saying that if they had left their homes, they were just going out to cause trouble?

Now I know in theory that Sterling’s real estate dealings have little to nothing to do with his ownership of a professional sports franchise. And I also realize that the settlement he negotiated to bring to an end a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles did not require him to admit to any guilt.

So there is no piece of paper that says he discriminated against black people or Latinos. But he does have to pay a fine of $2.725 million – which is a record-high fine for a case involving housing discrimination.

I DOUBT THE federal government could have pressured such a large settlement if there wasn’t some substance to the complaints against Sterling.

But it just makes me wary to read about such activity taking place among the ownership at a time when the NBA is trying follow the lead of many other sports leagues in seeking fan support from the Latino population.

In the case of the NBA, they’re developing a theme called ène-bè-a, which is meant to be a phonetic spelling of the Spanish pronounciation of the letters N-B-A.

It is the theme of the Spanish-language portion of the league’s website, and also is a marketing campaign that lets people know of the goings on of the six Latinos and 19 Latin American- or Spanish-born players in the NBA these days.

IN SHORT, THEY’RE trying to make it clear that Latin American athletes in this country aren’t solely playing baseball – although 25 players with Latino ethnicity is a far cry from the nearly 40 percent of Major League Baseball players who are either Latino (which is U.S.-born, for those of you who are clueless) or born in a Latin American country.

But is this one of those cases where certain teams are going to gain reputations for being less hospitable to the vision of the future than others?

It would not be unheard of.

In baseball, the Boston Red Sox to this day get some grief for being the last major league team to have black ballplayers (although the Philadelphia Phillies weren’t that far behind them). Both teams preferred to think of themselves as all white into the late 1950s – even after it was clear that black ballplayers (and darker-skinned Latin Americans) were here to stay.

THEN, THERE’S FOOTBALL, where the Washington Redskins’ ownership into the 1960s remained hard-core against black athletes, and only acquiesced when integration of the Redskins (that nickname is an issue of offense that we can discuss another day) would be a condition of their being allowed to play in the federal government-owned D.C. Stadium (later renamed for Robert F. Kennedy).

This is the potential category in which Sterling could be placing himself – the NBA equivalent of George Preston Marshall.

It’s not exactly the kind of environment I could picture many Latinos spending their money at.

Then again, perhaps the best revenge is one that is settled on the playing field. Perhaps the proper response for Latinos is not to reject the NBA, just the Clippers. It just means we’ll all have to be just like the rest of Southern California and root, root, root for the Los Angeles Lakers.

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